Secularism and the Bane of Religion

My post on the little mosque in Manhattan caused a minor dividing among those I know. About half of those who commented upon it loved it and half hated it. I lost a long-time Facebook/Twitter friend whom I have never met because of it. I suppose I am actually pleased that the vast noise of public life is such that it has precious little possibility that I will have to defend this beyond the circle of my near and dear.

The most cogent and extended critique was from an old friend on Facebook, but alas his critique in my view simply exposed the degree to which liberal thought has devolved into sentiment and wishful thinking. (If he wishes, I will be happy to quote his entire reply as a comment to this post.) The right wing is given entirely to hysteria and lies, and the left wing adjudges its positioning almost exclusively as counterpoise to those it opposes. So the reactionary christians hate the muslims, so the muslims must be okay. Not my view. I do not determine what I think by reference to a bunch of whack job christians who think that Einstein is a liberal plot.

I am interested in figuring out how secularists should defend a free society against religion. I make no bones about it: I think that religion ... all religion ... is a proximate threat to a free society and the autonomous individual who seeks to exercise his or her rights within that free society. Frankly, private religious belief is harmless, if silly. But the public practice of religion is inimical to a free society, no matter the assorted niceties, because its underlying and motivating ideology is about the reduction of the free individual to the demands of an irrefutable truth. All the falderal about communities of faith and dialog and respect among the believers is a frank and open lie; they're winking at us. Those who believe without the possibility of contradiction that there is only one truth and their group has it, then ultimately that is the source from which they will act once they get the chance. The liberal religious, pretending that things are nice, will have no impact upon the ideological religious should the latter have the power to enforce their views. On this, see Iran ... see Saudi Arabia ... see Russia for that matter, or Nigeria.

The religious only ever pretend, fooling even themselves a lot of the time, that they are tolerant. Their tolerance is the product of their impotence. And they always seek to reverse that impotence. With the power to act the tolerance vanishes.

I don't trust religion, I don't have to, and no amount of billing and cooing among the believers and the sycophants will change my mind. They have slaughtered too many. And fags are always at the top of their bloodstained lists. Call me parochial, but I keep a running count of which religion slaughters the most fags. You know, and I know, that the trail of blood is long and horrible. I have some pictures of teenagers being hanged in Iran for those whose experience of the horrors of religion is less visceral than it is for me.

So back to the wee innocent harmless mosque in the shadow of those towers that no longer cast a shadow.

The New York Times reports that the hapless sponsors to he project were unprepared for the storm. That was foolish ... but their innocence, like the much ballyhooed innocence of religion ... has the ring of a convenient stance. Evidently they will need to raise a $100 million. The innocent don't do that. So we secularists, seeking to defend our society against a religion which openly states that we should be forced to believe their ideology and practice their religion, surely have the right to ask where that money will come from. How much of that money are we prepared to accept as coming from Saudi Arabia? Remember, now, that Saudi money has played an enormous role in the recrudescence of the most reactionary forms of Islam throughout the world; it has built and financed countless madrassas that preach a virulent hatred of the secular.

And what happens even if the mosque is built with clean money? What prevents its sponsors from being overwhelmed by a tidal wave from the vast right wing of the Muslim world? A mosque is a vastly easier place to infiltrate and take over than a church. What plans do these people have in place to prevent the hatreds that besmirch mosques all around the world? Do they have a plan to prevent it from becoming a cesspit of homophobia? Will they set up a shelter for women seeking refuge from the reactionary views of Islam on the place of women and the routine and accepted violence that is visited upon them? Are they willing to discuss these issues openly?

We have the right, indeed the duty, to ask these questions. Just as we have the right and the duty to ask them of the Roman persuasion with its history of hatred and bloodlust. But the same liberals who cackle and shriek when another priest is exposed with his hands down some skinny boy's pants choose to give a pass to a religion that actively and currently executes juveniles for the act of loving each other.

Liberal muslims, such few as they are, act as apologists for the unthinkable. We do not need to apologize with them.

And liberals at the very least should apply to islam the same standards they apply to the papists.

Some argue that this is a private property issue, that those who own the land can do what they want. Not exactly a liberal position we would want to apply to your next door neighbor's desire to turn his home into a strip club or the desire of some right wing whack job to dump toxic chemicals into the water supply. As I argued in my previous post, because religion demands of the state special tax privileges, the state has the right to examine the motivation and appropriateness of any temple that comes along. Certainly those of us who are the victims of religion have the right to question as we choose whether this abuse of tax privileges is warranted in one or another circumstance.

Ah, but surely that is a breach of the freedom of religion. But just as my freedom does not mean that I can piss on your lawn, so their freedom does not mean that they can use their tax privileges to oppose my liberty or life. The freedom of religion is the freedom to choose what you want to believe. It is not the freedom of organized religion to do whatever it damned well pleases.

So we come to the heart of the matter. There are lots of mosques ... too damned many in my view, but I have that same view of churches and temples and altars of all manner ... so why not a mosque two blocks from the scene of the Twin Towers massacre? There are two reasons why rational secularists can reasonably disagree with this locating: firstly, because it is an offense to a free society that an ideology that actively opposes it can dance on a battleground and, secondly, because this has the potential to be seen and used as proof to the believers that they were right and that the massacre of innocents was a blow in their favor.

As I said before, they have no shame. And we who oppose religious tyranny are free ... so far ... to call that shame down upon them.

My good friend wrote, "Religion does not cause such attacks, it merely excuses them." Sorry but that is nonsense on the one hand and a specious distinction on the other. If it excuses them in advance: if religious ratiocination is the agar on which the germs of murder grew, then what is the actual distinction between cause and prior excuse? This is what is relevant: what the 9/11 murderers did is another episode in a dominant theme in Islamic history certainly since the earliest post-prophet conflicts, the era of the so-called rashidûn, the "rightly-guided" caliphs who followed Muhammad, three of whom were murdered by fellow believers. Only old Abu Bakr managed to die in his bed. More than one observer, myself included, notes the direct lineage of the 9/11 murderers in the Khawârij, or kharijites, of the early islamic period. These were the fanatics who took the prophet at his word and thought that the faithful in community should actually control government. That strain of islamic thought has never died despite occasional bloody repressions. So ... and I am prepared to argue this at considerable, even intolerable, length ... the 9/11 murderers are thoroughly islamic. Moreover, the protest against their slaughter was muted at best in the muslim world, and to this day remains a heroic episode for vastly more muslims than are ashamed at it.

Liberals may think that muslims bear no responsibility for 9/11, but that is not the view of the muslim world. Remember, they are corporatists; we are the individualists. We excuse their religion where they broadly accept that the murderers acted in the name of their religion even when they do not agree with the act.

My friend objected that I was adopting the Huntington thesis. The curiosity here is that I believe that that the Muslim world generally does adopt the Huntington thesis. They do accept that there is a clash of civilizations. Some account needs to be taken of that.

Now, let me retrench a little. I do not think that there is any realistic hope that islam will moderate or develop a wing of genuine secularist accommodation. But I do think that economic forces will eventually carve out some areas in the muslim world that will pay less and less real attention to the demands of religion. Some have argued that the articulation of islam in the western world will create a ground upon which such a rational incursion into the medieval structure of the religion might occur. I don't see it, and current evidence does not support it, but if that is to occur, it will do so only in the context of a deliberate and pointed challenge. To paraphrase Mao, ideologies do not change because of tea parties. They change because of struggle.

We have to have to guts to challenge the reactionary and bloodthirsty character of islam, to call it to account. Caving in to it, treating it like a neighborhood Italian-American Culture Club of sorts, will only pave the way to further calumnies.

The religious are more panicked at being exposed than ever because their nonsense is more exposed than ever. That the rising tide of religiosity is able to dominate so much of the globe reflects not a return to religion but the bloodthirsty demand of religion that it, and it alone, has great and deep and ultimate truth. We have to say, "No."

And that is what I am saying. No! Build your temple somewhere else. We are a free society. We do not accept the reactionary demands of any religion. And we do not have to. Yet.

Sarah and Sonia

Is there no limit to the soulless stupidity of the 'publican extremists? Did you watch the bizarre performance of soon-to-be-ex-governor of Alaska Sarah Palin today? How any rational commentator could actually think that this was a strategy to win the presidency is hard to fathom.

Both right and left like to pander to the masses while actually insulting such intelligence as the public, whatever that may be, actually exhibits. But the public would have to be criminally moronic to believe that today's free association madness merited anything more than a quick trip to the loony bin. The nonsensical, non-syntactic stringing of right-wing cliche, the winks and nods, the bizarre thought structures, the grating syncopations of voice ... well ... at this point, anyone who still credits John McCain with a lick of sense is simply not paying attention.

I am one of those who believe that there is a massive scandal licking at her heels. The fact that she has an eternal diabolic optimism should not hide the fact that she is a liar, a thief, a self-centered bitch ... that's a technical term, folks, and we know what it means. She'd eat her children for breakfast if they weren't so unappetizing.

But then again, perhaps she is marginally brighter, at least in the exercise, than the slobbering 'publican-heel-licking median "pundints" ... the "n" is deliberate ... she knows she has no political future, and she also knows that she can make a pot of money from the cynics at Fox. So why wait. Strike while the bones are still warm.

Levi Johnson is looking better all the time ... check out his shirt-free pics at GQ ... you have to watch the slideshow.

Meanwhile, the professional gasbags of 'publican prevarication have unleashed another wave of immodest, feigned-innocent horror at the Nazi-Stalinist, racist-anti-American Justice-in-waiting Sotomayor. Good lord. The real terror is that she, like many liberals, covers her sharp angles with a crypto-conservatism that eventually becomes a lifestyle. What happens if she and Scalia get buddy-buddy and decide that they have a novel "founders'-intent" theory on homosexuality ... something like the recently floated Obama line that the ban on gay marriage is actually the grant of the unboundaried civil right to marry anyone of the opposite sex that you want to. Her conservatism on crime is of the the infamous type that grants that the law, in its majesty, forbids the theft of bread by rich and poor alike.

She doesn't impress me. Obviously she is better than the other of-color Justice who recently opined that there is no constitutional protection against strip-searching 13-year-olds on less than the grounds of reasonable suspicion. But that is not saying much.

Don't get me wrong; I want her confirmed. But we have to face the fact that the 'publicans are so bereft of civic consciousness let alone intelligence in the face of threats to the Republic that they will suicide-bomb every single step taken by any opponent.

Alas, this is the state of the Republic on the eve of the Glorious Fourth.

On that unhappy note ... on to that Glorious Fourth. In our home, we plan to celebrate the revolution against kings and authoritarianism with seared flesh, unusual ales, and Fish-House Punch.


Photos by Arod ... top photo of a San Francisco sidewalk, and bottom photo of a display from last year's July 4 BBQ chez moi; we won't have those flags this year as my wonderful friend June, who supplied them, is unable to attend.

30 Minutes Free

The photo above is from a few days back and is my favorite pitcher, the Giants' Tim Lincecum. I meant to spend the evening watching wee Timmie pitching against the hated Dodgers of Los Angeles, but the game was at one rather than five, so I have just tuned in to find that the Giants scored two in the top of the 13th and went on to win.

The Dodgers are without Manny Ramirez, of course, because he was caught with untoward chemicals coursing through his veins. Manny complains that he took something prescribed by a non-Dodger doctor, but he took the 50-game suspension anyway. Not much protest for an innocent man. Perhaps because the steroid in question is widely believed to be a female hormone which curiously restarts testosterone production after a run of steroids. The country meanwhile froths itself up into further shock that ... egads ... there are steroids in baseball. What ... "gambling at Rick's"!

All sorts of writers and pundits and persons on the street call for their ... heads. No punishment is too severe. Ban, 'em, jail 'em, spurn 'em, and most assuredly don't let 'em into the Hall of Fame. I'm with San Francisco's incomparable sports columnist Bruce Jenkins who wrote in yesterday's Chronicle: "Better to just drop the [Hall of Fame] integrity clause and make conspicuous note - right there on the plaque - of any inductee's transgressions. Here stands Barry Bonds: noted cheater, hell of a ballplayer. Judge him as you will."

No one calls for a rationale approach to steroids, one in which we research pros and cons, and look for ways to use the economic value of performance enhancement to provide medical value for all of society. No, better to just point.

Because we have a problem in this country ... I would call it a madness of blaming. We are a giant audience of finger pointers, slouching in our lounge chairs and digitating madly at all the bad folks out there, all the people who got caught, everyone we can feel superior to. Nyah, nyah, you got caught ... off to jail with you.


There's another story in the news, totally different and horrifying. It seems that some whack jobs outside Dallas deliberately shot four people whom they thought were trespassing. Only it turned out they weren't trespassing. And it turned out that one of the four shot people, a seven-year-old boy, died. These lowlifes shot and killed a seven-year-old for apparent, though not evident, trespassing. What is even more horrifying is that under Texas law, chances are good that there would have been no charges had the four actually been trespassing.

According to the Houston Chronicle, the shooters' property was protected with a sign that read "Trespassers will be shot. Survivers will be reshot!! Smile I will."

This too is a part of the madness of blaming, though in a different sense than the self-satisfied finger-pointing at Manny Ramirez. These are people who sit on their front porch, rifles in hand, waiting to find someone to blame, and shoot. Imagine them scampering around grabbing the hardware ... "there's trespassers, ma ... git yer gun." The stir-crazy rage of people whose focus in life is so narrow that even a hapless puncturing of their property line calls for bloody murder.

Blame and panic ... albeit, in this case, a carefully contrived and self-absorbed panic.


Blaming and panicking. But it is typically a short cycle of blame and panic ... and thereby a kind of cheap panic. That is the tonic in these times for the overwhelming crisis that faces the species. Cheap panic. One day it is swine flu, then it is Manny, then it is a big-eyed girl child lost somewhere. Each of these items real and worthy of attention. But the short cycle of panic and blame reduces them by exploding them, turns them into bling when they are real events worthy of intelligence and reflection and examination.

Of course, we all know this. And we all know that there is nothing we can do about the permanent short cycle of cheap panic.

Rather, we are a society that is in the grip of a manic permanent state of recycling panic that is called the Republican Party. Not saying anything new here. They are proud of running around fowlly screaming that the sky is falling. Indeed, one terrifed opponent of gay marriage admitted as much in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle: "'We absolutely believe the sky is falling,' said Kris Mineau, a former Air Force pilot and pastor who is president of the Massachusetts Family Institute. 'But we believe it would be a generational downfall, not an overnight downfall.'" That's a change in tune, of course, but hardly a surprising one. Given that christians have been eagerly anticipating the apocalypse for 2,000 years, they have a lot of experience with stringing out their panic. They have, indeed, succeeded in grafting this theology of fear and panic ... and blame too ... onto one of the two quasi-state institutions that masquerade as political parties in this country.


So the 'publicans feed on and off panic. Big whoop. What annoys me is the degree to which our love of cheap panic in the hands of such commentators of Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow is having the effect of enabling Republicans to continue to dominate the national political debate out of all proportion to their shrinking base. Don't get me wrong ... I love those two. I listen to them most evenings as I go about my household duties after work. But they need to spend more time focusing on the debates within the dominant party about how to implement the perspective that accompanied Obama's great victory. Instead ... drub drub drub ... punish the torturers, lampoon the idiots, point fingers at the hypocrites. And, as the inimitable Talkingpointsmemo pointed out today, "Can it really be true that the list of Americans who will appear on the Sunday shows this weekend is David Petraeus, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich and John McCain?" Folks, it is not getting the job done.

And it undermines Obama who seem too willing to use the racket as an opportunity to soft pedal the perspective. He came into office as a man of big ideas. He is operating right now as a man happy that things are still moving along. Permanent cyclical panic as a mode of national life makes it nearly impossible to break out of the trap of tiny ideas, of yesterday's assumptions.

In other words, pointing fingers at Manny is of a piece with clean coal. Both issues would benefit from rational analysis and the development of policies that point to a new vision of the future.


But I am not optimistic. We are, with a nod to my last post, a bunch of cheap whores easily bought off by cheap sugar, cheap fat, cheap panic, cheap gas, and cheapening of the self that is a national obsession with finger-pointing. As long as we have our cheap we just roll on to the next thing. Not a lot of room to break out into something different when we are stuffing our pudgy faces with the moral equivalent of Twinkies.

So, there's a post ... 30 minutes I will not get back. A cheap 30 minutes.

30 minutes free. See ... I like cheap stuff too.

Photos by Arod: top photo of Tim Lincecum taken a few starts ago from my TV set; second photo taken a few years ago from a poster on Haight Street advertising a televised soccer event; third photo taken today on Linden Alley of a new piece of street art that replaced one of my favorite Obama pieces; fourth photo taken today of a poster on Lafayette alley advertising some upcoming Fox TV show that I promise to ignore; and the last photo taken today from a Walgreen's store window also on Linden alley.

Things are getting creepy ...

Halloween in the air. The World Series on the boob-tubery, as I like to call the TV. Tonight's game delayed by heavy rain in Phillie, and right now, bottom of the first, 2 on, nobody out and the total babe from UCLA, Chase Utley, at the plate. Beautiful, stud, intelligent, athletically gifted ... and a totally cool name as well. Some guys get it all.

The creepy part of the World Series from where I sit is that it involves the fake franchise with the fake stadium, the Tampa Bay no-long-Devil Rays. I never root for a team from Florida, and I certainly never root for a team with a scale model of a cupcake for a stadium ... unless they were playing the Dodgers, of course.

Lots of Halloween around town, but still no commitment from the city that gay folks will be able to celebrate Halloween in the way we know how. The totally creepy, grey-complected Bevan Dufty had a creepy opinion in the Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco's gay paper of record. He writes: "Through the second annual "Home for Halloween" campaign we are communicating - again - that there is NOT a party in the Castro. The streets will not be closed. There is no stage. There is no party. In short, unless you live and work in the Castro, there is no reason to come here that night."

Screw you, Dufty, and the lame jackass you rode into town. Gay guys have always made their own parties whether or not that pleases the homophobes and their simpering, slobbering apologists.

Later in his tiny-minded "opinion" he writes this about that much overblown shooting incident that led to his pissing on everybody's fun: "Two years ago, one person with a weapon marred an evening that had otherwise been one of the more peaceful in recent years." In other words, one idiot ruins it for everybody, and then Bevan "I am a hero in my own little mind" Dufty plays fake-daddy to all the straight yuppies who scorn us and brush past us in their me-me-me search for a latte and self-congratulation.

Alas, young gay guys today have no sense of what it took to win gay liberation, and they cave to the midget Dufty's by their abstention and flight. So we're screwed, and in being screwed, we have to pretend we are led by tiny, tiny men.

Sorry about the obscenity folks ... but the assault on Halloween in our neighborhood boils my blood ... in case you hadn't noticed.

Another creepy item in the BAR last week about Prop K which would legalize prostitution in San Francisco. Seems that all the progressives have lined up against it with this classically fallacious logic expressed in an article that turned my stomach: "While I certainly think consenting adults ought to do whatever they want, the situation on the streets is a different reality," said Chiu, a former chair of Lower Polk Neighbors [and a supervisorial candidate]. "Many unconsenting adults and children on the streets are forced into prostitution." Of course, forcing people into prostitution would still be illegal if consenting prostitution were legalized, but such subtleties are lost on the sex-haters. Of course, pimps beating up their whores would still be illegal, but that old canard is whipped up by fake-progressives who dare not, even in liberal San Francisco, be tarred by the brush of supporting the right of people to screw freely when they feel like screwing freely ... even if there's a price. Jeez, people work at MacDonald's for minimum wage, but that isn't illegal.

The campaign against prostitution is religious ... it says that the state must control the body according to the dictates of paternalistic bastards dead these three thousand years.

I'm for adults deciding for their own reasons to have sex when and where they want to, and I'm for the state getting out of everybody's pants.

I'm for the state getting its wrinkled puckered nose out of Halloween.

And I'm for the Phillies over the Rays.

Photos by Arod: top is an installation on the art fence surrounding the Project Artaud, middle is from a bar on Haight Street, bottom is from an abandoned gas station on Market at Sanchez ... they quickly deleted this art and now the lot is being turned into more housing for the unwelcome yuppie scum who haunt our city ... call me cranky, see if I blanche.

AI ... and I don't mean artificial intelligence

American Idol: I was plain blown away that David Cook won. Not unhappy, but totally taken by surprise.

So first of all, it's seems pretty obvious that this is an artifact of the aging of the AI audience. Although the finale had records numbers of viewers, it declined slightly in the 18-49 "demographic"; the quotes are for this ... what the hell is the 18-49 demographic? What does an 18 year-old twit have to do with a 49 year-old beer guzzler? I think 18-49 means "not old". It stinks and it makes no sense.

That said, Cook is a more mature act, savvy and expressive. I would buy his album tomorrow. The more amazing instrument is Archuleta's, at least in terms of raw gift. I hope he sings for a long time, and I hope his amazing vocal talent grows and entertains for decades well past hi obvious trajectory in teenie pop. But Cook is ready right now to rock the world. His gig with ZZ Top last night was stellar. He was glowing. Louis Bayard on Salon put it perfectly:

The only goose bumps "American Idol" afforded me this past season came when Cook mangled a piece of pop confectionery into something bitter and scalding and virtually unrecognizable. Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," Lionel Richie's "Hello," Mariah Carey's "You'll Always Be My Baby" ... who would have guessed these songs could ever sound dangerous? And yet that's exactly the transformation Cook pulled off, thanks to his deconstructive sensibilities and his innate musical intelligence (and the example of rock iconoclasts like Chris Cornell).

I have to note that Jason Castro's Hallelujah was polished and sublime. That kid has a mark to make if he can get off his stoner ass and care, and figure out that he has something to say. Meanwhile, Carly and Michael proved that they belong on Broadway. Syesha was strangely held back. I got a kick out of seeing the stripper, David Hernandez, again, but he clearly also needs to see his future in musical theater.

All that said, a great season. The right guy won. A couple of career's were launched. And we heard a whole heap of moving song.


On another note, and playing the jerk who is the modern cultural hero ... they knocked Judge Judy off the air because there is a fire near Santa Cruz. Come on people, let's get our priorities straight ... annoyed bureaucrats at home in their pajamas want their nightly fix of a grand bitch chewing out some idiots. Real news ... Israelis negotiating with Syrians notwithstanding that they are thereby Nazis according to dubya logic ... or Ted Kennedy, one of the finest men in public life in American history, about to exit because of a glioma ... surely a beautiful word like glioma should refer to a musical genre or a mathematical concept, not to a killer tumor ... real news I can abide. But yet another fire in a state which will be entirely consumed in fire over the next few decades as the wages of driving SUVs are demanded by Papa Nature ... yet another fire ... sorry as I can be for the poor sods who live there. There's a guy on the news talking about community on the mountain. He was burned out once before when he was a child. But he still lives there. It's gonna burn.

Of course, in the coffee-and-upholstery vein, I live on top of ... or leastwise slightly to the right of ... one of the deadliest tectonic faults in the world. So I had better be prepared to be sanguine about the great shaking that awaits me and mine.

Still, here I have a few minutes to myself and I wanted Judge Judy to put paid to some moron who figures he doesn't have to pay up. Oooops, better flip to something else.

Christians In the News

I want to start with Frank Rich's column on Sunday ... The All-White Elephant in the Room ... which, as usual, nails the point to the wall. I suggest you read it if you have not, and I will say of it only that he points out that the Rev. Wright is hardly unique in his extremist posturing on the basis of religion. If you want a taste of the sort of religious bigot that the teflon maverick McCain is sucking up to, try this little clip of the "reverend" John Hagee. Not surprising to Jews or gays, by the way, because these guys love to hate, and hatred is what fuels them. Wright, Hagee, or the tottering Pat Robertson who may finally have written himself into irrelevance with his imbecilic endorsement of Mr. oily himself, the cleanly forgotten Rudy Giuliani.

My problem is about why a man who ought to be an atheist like Obama has to pretend to christianity to have a career in anything. Or at least I figure he must be an atheist, because he is certainly smart enough. (Smug, self-satisfied grin.)

More to the point, though, is the obvious historical fact that christianity has always made a big business of condemning the society in which it resides for the monstrous sins of the occupants. Christ did it. Saint Augustine, the miserable old bugger who is the proximate cause of the bloodthirsty loathing at the core of catholicism, thought that he was surrounded by evil incarnate. The response of the great monk Alcuin, later in the service of Charlemagne, to the bloody assault of the Vikings on the undefended Lindesfarne monastery was to ask "Consider carefully, brothers, and examine diligently, lest per chance this unaccustomed and unheard-of evil was merited by some unheard-of practice." Not being of a graphic mind, albeit certainly possessed of pornographic suspicions, Alcuin did not specify the evil which God was punishing. But he was sure that the Vikings ... the Islamic terrorists of their day, and a damned sight more effective they were ... were God's vengeance on his own evil society.

Frank Rich rightly notes that the current outcry against the silly "reverend" Wright stinks of racism. I think it suggests that Wright, and by extension Obama, is a little less American than maverick war hero McCain. So the war hero can pursue a bunch of bigots ... the same bigots who worked against McCain in 1980 in concert with the dimwit who currently holds the office he seeks ... but that is all American. By the way, McCain's christianity has all the passion of Reagan's, who hauled himself off to church like the B-actor that he was. When the black Obama, raised by muslims, decides he wants the same christian cover used by politicians of every ilk ... well, it's just not quite as American. I think that is the unspoken paradigm. It is a way for the right wingers to express how unamerican Obama is without saying it. They plan to specialize in this particularly tawdry tactic.

From the tragic to the farcical, poor suddenly christian Jason Castro has been dumped from American Idol. I believe that he could have a career in christian music ... he is drippy enough, and he is dreamy enough, and he knows how to wear a cross. Of course he would have to get over the laziness or stoner mentality that doomed him. The careful reader of my tinklings will note that I sang his praises more than once, especially with reference to his sublime rendering of Daydreaming Boy. Sometime after that performance, he started to sport a cross. I assume it was a ploy for votes ... but then, as one might note, I assume that most religious display is a ploy of some type. I was disappointed. Still he managed a few more memorable songs, and he could have nailed both of the songs he tried last Tuesday (I Shot the Sheriff and Mr. Tambourine Man). He was made to sing those songs. But he could not rouse himself to care ... or he was just plain too dumb, as my friend TF notes, to understand the music. I figure he was tired out and wanted to give up.

But he always has that annoying cross to fall back on ...

(I later watched a YouTube clip of his "singing out" ... in other words closing the show ... he chose I Shot the Sheriff again and this time he nailed it ... he acted too. Really sweet. I hope he has a career, at least so we get to look at him, and I hope he abandons the cross when it no longer suits his hype.)

There is one more little cross to bear as well ... sweet Tim Lincecum of the Giants ... sweet, not this time his taut, "ripped" (to use Kruk's phrase) frame, but sweet, his fastball and now truly sweet change-up ... sweet, he may be, but he is sporting a cross as well. It is one of those broad seemingly titanium jobbies. It pops in and out of view tight around his sinewy little neck. He has always worn this leather thong thing around his neck, and I noticed that, so I have to assume that the cross is new given that I have never seen it before. Now it is not one of those bloody wooden "Mel-Gibson" crosses such as the most fanatical christian in baseball, Todd Helton, sports almost navel low. Some properly agnostic pitcher should complain that the dangling splinter is bothering his concentration and make him take it off. Anyway, it is depressing that wee Timmie has taken up the cross. Not sure if this is just the way he is, or if he was the victim of one of those christian lurkers who haunt locker rooms to try to take athletes as a kind of booty.

There is just such a lurker at the Sports Cafe at MRU, the major research university at which I labor. He is short and overfed, being overfed being no bar to christianity, notwithstanding all the humility and poverty stuff of which the Christ makes such a to-do in his big book, nor to mention the seven deadly sins of which gluttony is prominent. He drives another one of those monstrous SUVs ... I think it is a Land Rover, though I can't tell one from the other ... just that the thing is damned big, and the poor dwarf has to clamber out of it like a crab on a rock at low tide. He scurries across the parking lot, clutching the inevitable bible in hand, and then finagles some muscle bulging studly dude ... I have only ever seen him with males ... into a heartfelt conversation, heads bent low and whispering spittle-contact close. If he were trying to bed the dude, everyone would be outraged. We live in a society where a little nooky is outrageous, but duping innocent young minds with life-denying piffle is the work of saints.

Back to Lincecum ... still have to love him because the pitching is so sweet. I think I will hang my hat on the following, without even a jot of evidence ... I'm going to go with the cross as a beard to obscure the fact that he is gay ... yeah, that'll do it. They're all gay ... every damned one of them. Again with the smug self-satisfied grin.

Photos by Arod, both from a Sunday Walking with Loki. The church is from Fort Mason, and the poster is from a surf shop at Fisherman's Wharf. The Alcuin quote is from page 30 of Justin Pollard's Alfred the Great: The Man Who Made England which I am revisiting in preparation, I hope, for a post on accident in history. That said, I am being seduced by what appears to be an excellent history of Prussia ... hmmm, the dilemmas, the dilemmas.

Try to be nice ...

I have a nasty little post in my mind, but it will have to wait notwithstanding that it will be dated by the time I choke it out. Besides, wouldn't it be so much nicer if everyone were just nice. Now that would be nice.

Being congenitally nice requires a native blindness or, failing that, an ability to fake it at least sufficiently not to tip off the congenitally blind that they are being mocked. Now I am nice enough ... congenitally ... sufficiently nice to say a cheery hello to all and sundry, and to keep 'em all laughing. At work, of course, I suppress the filthy side of my ribaldry, and I think that is wholly appropriate. Most funny people, it has been my experience, have utterly filthy minds but have the good sense to drop the dirty bombs only in those intimate circumstances where other perverts are present and lurking. Perverts always lurk, even in plain view.

All that aside, and rambling on, it is precious difficult to be nice when one is surrounded by morons, and if you have been out of the house even once in the last year or so, you will no doubt have noticed the startling prevalence of morons and their complete lack of shame. Cell phones seem to be like marking devices for morons ... a sort of walking chemical test. Get a moron and a cell phone in the same ecosphere and you are bound to have an explosion. Like the dribbling moron female with a baby papoosed to her who blocked the narrow sidewalk where I was attempting to pass as she shouted something unintelligible into her moron marker. She had a friend with a child also ... the be-childed travel in clumps, as we know. The friend, cast adrift by her cell-phone addled papoose mama, vainly essayed to control her meandering offspring who was wont to wander in the road. When I was a child, a simple "don't do that" was sufficient. But the cell phone mamas, once weaned from their electronic teats, beg and moan at their children lest a simple command ruin them for life. Of course, spending an entire childhood with a cell-phone besotted mother would drive anyone to Bedlam.

Another child moment ... some child in arms squalling in the Caltrain station at Palo Alto while mama wiped its tears and talked to someone else. I remarked to RL that when I was a child, tears in a public place were greeted with the standard, "Keep crying and I'll give you something to cry for." I felt terribly hard done by, but I stopped crying. I like the old way.

Wait a second, I thought I was trying to be nice. So let me recount the joys of walking my dog. Well there was the idiot woman with a giggly smile and a large dog offleash who forced me and my tightly leashed Loki into the street. When I protested, she berated me ... I responded with a pithy remark which reflected poorly upon her overall intelligence. She, in fact, did not have the intelligence for an appropriate rejoinder that might have melted me ... so now I get to glower at her should I see her again. Hopefully she is just an interloper who walks her dog monthly. Too bad for the dog who looked to be only mildly less intelligent than she.

Also on the dog walk, the proud new probably liberal owner of some giganto-black-darkened-window-SUV parks the thing with more care than they take in docking the space shuttle ... it is nearly the size of the space shuttle. It has dealer plates which means that this perky proud liberal bought the damned thing within a few days or weeks. As he stands all chino-bedecked at Starbucks and gorges on his triple fat vanilla chai latte with ground cinnamon harvested by virgins in the forests of Nepal above the tree line ... does he not read the New York Times stories on global warning? Does he think that reality and its torments stops at the door of his 3.5 million dollar condo with hot tub and conjugal slavery and drooling spoiled spawn. He looked awfully content, even glowing. He had one of those surfer board holder thinggies on the roof ... probably just aerodynamic, since he and his wife spend their evenings eating beef at some local eatery where they can laugh gaily with their friends and ignore the blight they leave wherever they trod.

I gave him a withering look, as best I could muster, but he was playing with some electronic control in his new planet killer. Masturbating without release. If only global warming differentially drowned SUV owners ... how sweet would that be.

But it would not be nice.

Global Cooling

RL just handed me a Manhattan ... that was my first favorite drink when RL converted me from wine sipper to what I would call a spirits guy. Probably my favorite now is a chilled dry martini, but RL's cocktails are always so exquisite that it does not matter which of the drinks he proffers from his broad and expanding repertoire.

I changed my sig line at work today ... simplified, really, but added this line: One planet. Think global warming with every action we take.

I thought about the line a long time ... it is not particularly felicitous, but I did not want it in the second person as that seems so accusatory.

To set the scene ... the Giants are in a nice game with the D-backs, and Kevin Correia ... who seems like the nasty, dirty boy next door from the one family held lowest in regard by the peacock proud neighbors ... is pitching well, but is down 3-2 in the 6th.

Anyway ... I have meant for a while to speculate thusly (am I allowed to say thusly?) ... what if it were global cooling? What if Texas were threatened with August blizzards?

In other words, what if the physics of carbon dioxide were such that it blocked solar energy, and we were facing not a warmer but a cooler planet. The low-bore immoralists who continue to suck up giant obscene SUVs do so either because they don't care or because they rationalize that a warmer planet will provide for more summer vacations on the beach. But what if they were confronted with an imminent ice sheet crossing Lake Ontario and taking out Ohio.

Global cooling would have inspired faster action. I'm sure of it. Global warming seems like a boon, and it is easy for the blinkered to imagine that the scientists are doom-and-gloomers ... they just just buy some sunscreen and a new pair of speedos and head to the beach. It's summer party time, all year long.

One more thing on global cooling ... am I the only atheist who is puking at all the fawning over pope Rat? Talk about global warming. This is a guy who is from the most reactionary wing of the church ... he'd light the pyres, baby, if only he could. The New York Times has a blog on the pope with lots of commentators ... all Christians plus one Jew. No atheists, though. Atheists see through the charade. Atheists are not impressed by a fascist spewing hatred borne of a fourth-century self-loather whose doleful influence has been the proximate cause of death and misery beyond counting.

One skeptic I know well, my good friend Jim, noted with ribaldry that it is the pope who has the ruby slippers ... see my immediately previous post for context ... now, more than ever, we need Judy to rescue the ruby slippers from the evil witch from the East.

Global cooling, the pope with ruby slippers, Giants losing. What a wretched evening.

Photo by Arod, looking up in the National Gallery, Ottawa, Canada

Fag-Baited in the Castro

Yes, fag-baited in the Castro in front of my house by a pert pretty early-20s-something female school teacher leaning out the window of her vast SUV planet killer bought for her by her parents in Kansas.

Back in the early 80s, I was fag baited a few times in the Castro. I remember a bunch of christians driving by and scraping their fingers in the "shame on you" symbol as Gaetano and I walked hand-in-hand ... this was at a time when the christians were routinely invading the neighborhood and staging little performance autos-da-fe, as it were. I was once threatened, and scared, by a group of cholo dudes yelling "fag" from a fast car screaming around the corner at 16th and Market late at night. And some kid once showed me a knife ad gave me the finger through the window of a bus at Castro and Market. All those were in the 80s. Once in the 90s a decrepit foul homeless guy screamed "fag" at me at Castro and Market.

But tonight was the most unsettling I have ever experienced in this neighborhood.


I really do not like SUVs ... and I especially can't bear the really big ones. Cities are drowning in brain-dead, me-me-me, SUV driving. I hate it when they buzz you, I hate it when they run stop signs, I hate it when they conspire to destroy our planet. So, Wednesday last, I arrive home from the dog walk, blissful from the oxygen notwithstanding the fatigue from a long day of labor in the modern work force ... and there in the driveway is this enormous blood-sucking SUV with those blinding "screw-you" lights flooding the front of the house, idling, and this tiny little missy blabbing away on the cell phone. You know, I would have let it slide if the thing hadn't been idling. But it stuck in my craw. I tried to get her attention, but she turned so she wouldn't have to look at me. Well that did it.

I have a voice that can crack concrete. I can project right through the president-for-life black-tinted windows of the most armored gargantuan SUV ever made ... and so I let fly with a "Hey" just slightly below the decibel level of a 747 preparing to take off. Little missy snottily powers down the window, and I told her ... let me not quote exactly ... to get her friggin planet-killer out of the driveway. She bleated something about how she didn't tell me how to live so ... I cut her off and said to get her planet killer out of the driveway. This went back and forth, and at some point she tried to excuse her behavior by proclaiming "I'm a school teacher" and "my parents bought me the car." It had Kansas license plates. And when I still insisted that she park somewhere else, she stated, "You're a homosexual so you're being mean to me." I'm pretty sure that is exactly what she said. I know I heard "homosexual." I suppose part of my problem was that that she had no more wit in her tiny gray matter than to fag-bait as repartee.

Little missy, on the dole from her Kansas-bound parents, can afford to invade the heartland of gay liberation and fag-bait her neighbors who express their considered opinion that it is an obscenity to drive an SUV larger than the houses in which 75% of the world's population live. I figured that she was raised religious given the snake-spitting manner in which she recited the word "homosexual". I called her on the fag-baiting, at which point she looked at me pissy, and backed out and went away.

Unsettling ... this neighborhood is going straight, and that is the result of the real estate crisis and 'publican favoring of the rich in public policy. Not much one can do. People can go where they want, and that is the way it should be. But it raises two issues for those of us who were around before and during gay liberation. Firstly, roughly 99.99% of all neighborhoods in the world are straight. There are perhaps a half dozen, maybe 10, gay neighborhoods in the United States, and in a decade, there will be none. We've already seen the self-righteous new helicopter parents in this neighborhood demand that gay bookstores not display erotic images, and we'll see more of that. And we'll see coddled little missies gay-bait their neighbors casually and out of that special haughty preciousness that is the gift of over-protective parenting to everyday life.

But secondly, and more significantly, when we came out publicly during the high days of the gay movement, we did so not just as individuals and groups of individuals ... we also did so as people, primarily men, who had relocated and collected ourselves in neighborhoods. We had behind us a place ... really two places, the neighborhood and the bars. In Vancouver, we used to call the bars "the ghetto" ... a lot of gays guys used that language ... you'd say, "what are you doing tonight," and the reply would be "I'm going to the ghetto," which meant going to the bars. So the neighborhoods were then and have been a source of strength and organization and creativity. I know everybody likes to assume that the intermingling of open gays into other neighborhoods presages the "happy" elimination of a distinction between gays and straights, but only those ignorant of history, whether coyly or foolishly, would deprive us of the ability to fight back should our militant enemies seek to move against us. Not having neighborhoods will make us more vulnerable.

And that is what is so unsettling. The little shit in her monster SUV felt perfectly comfortable gay-baiting, just as comfortable as she feels in driving a planet-killer in a crowded city for which she has no native feel. The history and edge and charm of our city were built by its rebels and misfits and free-thinkers, and not by the rich or by the coddled ... and we are increasingly at danger of becoming just another suburban hellhole drowning in SUVs and prams and plastic packaging and the self-centered.

Gay liberation consciously took as its models women's liberation and the black movement. But the truth is that we are more like Jews, minus the genealogical and religious angles, than women or blacks. Just as with the Jews, for millennia we have been the ever-present other, always available for a timely pogrom should the powerful or the ideological or the sanctimonious feel the need for it. It is hard to imagine a full-scale attack on Jews in America, but when you think of the social dislocation of the decline of the empire over the next decades, it is not hard to imagine gays taking the brunt of some misplaced rage. We are, after all, the target of the single most virulent religious and ideological hatred in America today. One of the two main political parties has come to power in large part by attacking us.

I have been reading Tom Reiss' The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, the story of a Jew born in Azerbaijan who masqueraded as a Muslim prince in the gathering gloom of Nazi Germany. The Jews of the 20s in Germany played huge roles in society, as do gays today. They had been supporters of the war, they were nationalists, they were integrated into the economic engine as it by turns sputtered and roared. They lived and worked side by side with everyone else ... but none of that saved them.

Would the Kansan school teacher in Papa's SUV come to our aid if we are attacked? Or would she view it as a real estate opportunity?

I fulminated over this post for a long time ... and when I fulminate, I do not write. I am sitting in the garden on a beautiful day as my ex pulls out the winter's weeds. I will try to write something happy soon. Photo by Arod of some street art that appeared in an abandoned gas station at Sanchez and Market in the Castro. They plan to build condos there now; perhaps there will be room for a few more Kansan remittance babies.

Good News

A couple of pieces of heartwarming news in the New York Times. First off, it seems that fewer and fewer 16-year-olds are getting licenses. I've long held that we have the age of consent laws all backwards ... it should be free to have sex at 16, free to drink at 18, free to drive at 21 ... and free to have a cell phone at 30 ... ooops, too cranky. Demographics may be looking after the first three.

And more Americans are giving up golf, the world's most environmentally destructive game. If golf were played more as it was when it was invented ... unmanicured fairways, everybody has to walk and carry their own clubs ... it would not be such a blight, stealing parkland for the few and shedding toxic runoff.

So the planet may be heading for a broiling hell, but in the meanwhile a couple of happy indicators. La de da.

Rambling

I promised some time ago to upload a photo of the old toad who died so unexpectedly a while back ... and here it is. He was certainly an old friend ... he sat unperturbed on various of the rocks in his tank by the front door and stared back at me for more than a decade. I still miss him.

I have the animal thing in spades. I watch out of the window of the train in the morning and try to count egrets and herons on the big pond right aroud South San Francisco. Today in Golden Gate Park, I sat the dog down and he and I both were transfixed by the bison who were munching away no more than 15 feet away, albeit separated from us by a pair of fences. I say hello aloud to sparrows and crows and whatever unhappy small mammal manages not to hide himself from me. I have a dozen tanks in the house, fish and amphibians. Over the years, I have kept various crustaceans and gastropods as well, though the only such beings I have now are piggy-backers and stowaways.

The problem with keeping animals is that eventually they die. Like people. Perhaps my later life habit of keeping animals relates to all the men I lost to AIDS. While they live, I relish them. When they die, I mourn ... and, in mourning, remember mourning.

Driving around yesterday ... warm day, too many human beings out and about for my taste, but there was no way out of it because I absolutely could not wait any longer to buy new work shoes ... some character on NPR rambling on about how research has shown that people who lie about embarassing things tend to be more successful in life than those who tell the truth. They did a study ... that line is always humorous to me ... and asked people embarassing questions like "Have you every fantasized about raping someone or being raped by someone" and "do you enjoy your ... shall we call them ... movements" ... and then correlated their answers to their success in assorted endeavors in life. They asked a bunch of college athletes before a big swim meet, and the ones who wouldn't admit to embarassing stuff tended to end up being the winners.

Tonight on 60 Minutes, Katie (hand me a bag) Couric kept pestering Hillary with a bunch of inane questions about whether she has doubts, and Hillary just said that winners never think negatively (this is a considerable reduction). Hillary is right, I suppose, and I suppose we really do want a President who is and thinks she is a winner. But that ain't me, no way. I recently confessed to my big boss (by "big" I mean two or more leaps above me in the chain of command) that I always start a project by imagining complete, abject failure. That seems to calm me, because once I have live through that nightmare, I am the more at home with imagining success.

But that is not where I started to go here ... I was thinking about reliving the grief of dead friends through the death of long-time captive animal friends. It must say something about a low-bore depressive/contemplative personality that I surround myself with tiny creatures that, no matter how much delight they provide me, will eventually pass on and leave me at least passing empty.

This is too depressing. Especially after a weekend with two long beautiful walks in urban nature.

So, a propos of nothing ... and I think I have raised this before ... why is it that the Tai Chi/Falun Gong people who crowd the park weekends have not learned that cheap boom boxes and poorly recorded tapes have been superseded by very cheap and high quality digital recordings? Are there no Tai Chi people with iPods? I do find these little gluts of quasi-military physical reciters a little annoying ... I don't mind the ancient Chinese ladies, but the males under 50 bug me, and the old guys who, even when not waving their arms, studiously ignore my existence ... they bug me too.

But if you are going to walk in the park and enjoy the experience, you have to let such self-absorbed irritations be fleeting and minor ... and so it is ... and turn it quickly to self-mocking at how persnickety one would be if one did not rein in impulse and reaction.

So too I reined in impulse on another score. Recently in the park, they installed a "disk golf course" in an old forest that had long been typically empty of humanity except for a few dog walkers vainly seeking solitude. Yech, I said, and I vowed petulantly and angrily that I would not let them interfere with me with their frisbees and what I assumed would be their arrogance. Well, the "frisbee golf course" finished, now the disc-golf-tribe is out and about in little groupings ... and it turns out that they are a harmless lot obviously, uninterested in interfering with cranky middle-aged dog walkers feigning a scowl the better to chase away encounter. They wander about typically in fours ... the stoner underdressed equivalents of golfers, I suppose. It turns out that disc warriors need multiple discs to play their game, and each one of them carries a squarish bag to bear the tools of their sport ... and their pot and beer, one suspects. All middle-aged white guys, ill clad, and slumping as they walk and talk in low tones. There was one woman, but I had to look quite closely to determine that she was in fact a she ... she was not so much mannish or frumpy as evidently preferring dumpster-diving fashion.

So I will accept them as I accept the Tai Chi mafia ... everyone in the park resents everyone else ... sort of like culture vulture tourists in Bali ... as if the experience would be the more genuine if only I were the only one who knew about it.

Cranky, cranky. I feel a little like my old toad pictured at the top of this ramble.

Photo by Arod.

Crack Whores

Does anything more clearly illustrate how American government acts like a bunch of crack addicts than the current bipartisan stimulus package response to the gathering economic doom. Let's see ... we worked ourselves into a crisis by loaning the ineligible too much money so that they could spend it on homes they could not afford. Then we traded the resultant worthless paper from hand to hand until somebody got stuck holding the bag, as it were. Then we decided that government should bail out a few of the borrowers and jury-rig the economy to save the bag holders. And when a relatively minor ripple worked its way through the stock markets, we offered every American a check for $600 so we could spend our way out of the crisis.

We're on crack.

Crack whores (no gender reference implied) know that the key to a successful crack existence is a steady stream of five-dollar bills. No point in wasting time creating a stable economic existence when five bucks every three or four hours will keep the demon spawn in your lungs. So government, following this dubious economic theory, in the face of unsustainable waste and graft and over-consumption answers with a metaphorical pile of fins to the masses. "Don't worry, ma, about the world collapsing. Let's go shopping."

A few nights ago, exhibiting my "male gaze" (and I use the term dripping with sarcasm) through channel surfing behavior, I caught 2.5 seconds of the McCain creature speaking ... he said, "We need less government regulation." He would be such a disastrous president. Less government regulation, but "mickey fin" style crack subsidies for the lower American middle class. (Isn't supplying checks to everyone out of the nation's piggy bank "government intervention" ... is that an example of less government? Give me a break.)

Republican economic theory (and I use the word "theory" lightly in this context) is like the theory that led to the crack epidemic. Crack is just cocaine packaged for the less-well-off. It was a brilliant stroke of commodity manipulation ... a Walmart approach to drug sales. Now everyone could afford cocaine, and the drug of the elite became the bane of the inner city, as well as job security for the prison unions. In the same vein, as it were, Republican economic theory is based on the notion that government is always bad. This makes sense to the billionaires, but for ordinary people bad government means no streets, no services, crappy schools, expensive health care. So how do you package this win-lose economic theory to those who have the most to lose? Give them cheap crack ... Walmart crack, ideological one-liner crack, swaggering populist crack, Fox News ... and every now and then, give them 600 bucks a head. You take the elite drug of choice ... Reagonomics ... and you turn it into crack ... dubya-ism.

And the well is so poisoned that no reasonable Democrat dare oppose this nonsense in an election year because ... because we're all addicted to political crack.

What would happen if we did like FDR ... we took that $150 BILLION they are planning to shovel via you and me into Walmart and Targét, and underwrote the construction of 300 Orange Country style water treatment plants? Or, more reasonably, a combination of water treatment plants and sundry carbon saving power plants. We would give people jobs, jump start the most innovative part of the American economy, save the environment, and let the world know we are looking to go about our business in a more rational way.

No way ... cuz we're a bunch of crack whores who ache for more bling made in China. "I need a new plasma TV, mommy." Sure, sez mommy, just wait till I get my government check.

Crack whores ... going to hell on the fast track.

Photo by Arod, taken today on 18th Street near Castro.

60 Minutes

Postscript: See the excellent article by Nicholas Schmidle in today's New York Times magazine for analysis of the state of Jihadi politics in Pakistan.

Let's blog 60 Minutes.

"Did you like her?" Good grief. Is that what 60 Minutes has come to? Lara Looloo, whatever her name might be, is a pale shadow of a journalist, softballing Musharraf with questions like that about Bhutto, and then faking toughness about Osama, apparently trying to play to the imagined vast crowd of the ignorant who prefer to know nothing about what it is that makes Pakistan such a hopeless place. It's not Osama ... its much more than that. Pakistan may be a tough country, but the politics is real and subject to analysis that goes beyond "liking" and Osama. This looks like the same sort of method that the "pundits" use to support 'publicans ... phony questions that let a smiling crook look good.

Don't get me wrong ... I confess to having been a little soft on Musharraf who was ... was, past tense ... the best dictator Pakistan ever had. Not a tough competition. He replaced the venal and, frankly, stupid Nawaz Sharif whose claims to legitmacy rest on ignorance ... he didn't know about Kargil, he didn't know that the army actually runs everything, just another innocent caught in the lights. Hmmm. Give me a break. The worst thing about Bhutto's death may be that it gives cover to that creep.

"Misperceptions of American thinking" says Musharraf ... but Lara Looloo misses the moment, no doubt because her knowledge of the background is rather less than any other miscellaneous sorority girl elevated to newsperson, and she lets Musharraf off the hook. Then, she pretends to get get tough about Al Quaeda without evidencing even the slightest background in what the frontier provinces represent. Gawd, this is awful.

But remember, 60 Minutes is actually the best, notwithstanding the temporary sidelining of Jon Stewart.

Story 2 is a mobster executioner with Steve Kroft. Entertaining, not important. 60 Minutes excels at this sort of thing. "Are you still a Catholic?" Steve asks ... and the mob executioner finally squirms a little. Fascinating ... I'd still rather have a proper story on Pakistan. Some touching remembrances of Ed Bradley who curiously played high school football with the future mobster.

And now story 3, the dastardly Roger Clemens. Seems a lots like the Bonds line except that instead of flax seed oil, he got B-12 ... yeah ... I don't believe him any more than I believe Bonds. I don't really care, and I don't doubt that he worked hard. Frankly, Clemens looks nervous, and I think he's lying. What do I know? That said, I also think he played by the de facto rules that management and players AND fans silently agreed to. But I think he dunnit.

"I was eating Vioxx like it was Skittles." That's pretty frightening. But then he criticizes steroids as a quick fix. Hmmm ... which is which?

It ends up being a pretty compelling interview, and I probably like the guy better than when it started. I still don't believe him, and I still don't care. Just as long as they apply the same standards to Bonds as they do to Clemens. And just as long as sooner or later we apply the standards of science to steroids and figure out what part is good and what part is bad.

And finally, Andy Roooney on the primary season, singing the praises of Roosevelt and Jefferson. Seems safe. So he devolves into pointless meandering about names. Cmon Andy. There's more grist for the mill in these bizarre early primaries than that.

Four stories, one compelling, three misses. You can do better than that, folks.

Sodden Foolishness

Back to work today after 12 days off ... that's not the foolishness in question .... nor is the bizarre American habit of stooping to divine the future of the highest office in the land by a seemingly almost accidental canvassing of a tiny bunch of white farmers in Iowa who have the time and the inclination to take a drive in wintery weather to a local school or church. Foolish, indeed, but not the foolishness I plan to address. Certainly foolishness is the name of the self-congratulatory cackling of the TV talking heads who do not seem to have had an original thought on American politics since one of them hit on the red-blue thangie. But that is not the foolishness pursued here.

So I get back in the office, and I lose an hour with all the software updates that have accumulated in our absence. I work at a major research university which I call MRU ... not because anyone with the inclination could not figure out the name ... I mean, I live in San Francisco, I take the train about 40 miles, and it is not Cal which is where I got all my assorted degrees ... hmmm ... I choose not to name it because the blog is about my ramblings not about my place of employment, and I don't want it to show in searches.

Anyway, back in the office, finally looking at the rather sparse accumulation of email, and the first message of the new year is from a student who has signed on to the new University sponsored wellness program ... let's call it Wellness@MRU ... that encourages staff, faculty, and students to shape up and set goals. Here is what this poor sod wrote (enough changed to protect the sodden):

I'm R, an MRU grad and fellow Wellness@MRU member. It's that time of year when we're all thinking about our New Year's Resolutions, and I just wanted to share mine and how I'm using Wellness@MRU to help me stick to it.

This coming year, I've decided to drink at least 12 cups of water every single day (did you know that almost 90% of us are chronically under-hydrated!). That's my re-hydrating resolution for a thirst-quenching 2008. I set this as a goal on Wellness@MRU and track how many cups I drink every day.

I also set myself a reminder on Wellness@MRU so everyday at 11am I get a text message on my cell phone: "Drink More Water!" I invited a few friends to support me, and they've been good about checking in with me and letting me know when I missed a day here or there, and I've been enjoying interacting with people in the Healthy Eating Community who are making their own diet changes. My friends on Wellness@MRU automatically get notified when I track my progress, so it's been fun to get little well-wishes every time I update my log.

I thought it was a joke, so I clicked on the link, and sure enough, this guy thinks drowning himself in 12 glasses of water will improve his health. What a crock! It used to be 8 cups a day, so I guess the 12 cups of water a day is inflation.

The only thing more ludicrous than the 8 cups of water myth is the idiocy of people drinking bottled water in a modern industrial society. Idiocy. In fact, it is the single biggest scam in the history of humanity. It's like the pet rock thing gone nuclear.

What precisely causes perfectly intelligent people ... remember, this is one of the greatest research universities in the world ... to swallow this nonsense. "They did a study", and it turns out that there is a mechanism in the body to indicate when you need water ... it's called thirst. Drink when you're thirsty. Who'da thunk it?

And who with even the simplest rational mind can believe that 90% of Americans are chronically dehydrated ... would it be possible to palm off any more frivolous piffle than this anywhere on this planet of foolish mythologies? Lunatic beliefs are depressing enough, but when intelligent people create drooling foolishness ... is there no hope at all?

Have you ever seen these sexy young morons crossing campus carrying a gallon of water ... I mean, really, a gallon bottle of water. Even one of these two-quart bottles is moronic. These people are not heading out across the Sahara. They are going to class in a private university in a wealthy community in the richest country in the history of the world. But they seem to think that they have to drag a gallon of water along. What happened to their grey matter? Who taught them this nonsense?

I posted a comment on the guy's site including bottled water = global warming and referred him to this item on snopes.com that exposes this fraud. Or check out this refutation of the superiority of bottled water.

Friends don't let friends drink bottled water!

Photo by Arod ... a fountain at MRU.

Tiny Minds ...

Tiny minds make tiny cities, and the pencil sharpener Supervisor Bevan Dufty who personally killed Halloween is just the sort of civic midget that would turn San Francisco into a day care center for lobotomized adults. We had a little correspondence. I wrote him a note in much the same terms as my post on Halloween. He replied:

Thank you for your message. To me it's not cowardice to protect the public safety of the neighborhood. It's what I was elected to do.

I’m relieved that we saw a safe event last night. That said, I was saddened to take steps that were dramatic but necessary.

We certainly want to create an Office of Special Events and involve people in planning for 2008. I am all too aware that a non-event strategy will not be workable with Halloween on a Friday next year. We have much to do for next year, but I feel we've turned a corner and have some good things to build upon.

I wrote back to him:

Thank you for your note. I wrote a post on my blog here: http://arodsf.blogspot.com/2007/10/halloween-shame.html

The problem is that you did NOT have an event, so to claim you had a SAFE event is an oxymoron. I spent the most formative decade of my life in the gay liberation movement in the 70s, and what guaranteed our impact was that we did not run from a challenge. You did. In doing so, you committed a terrible affront to gay people, our history, and our creativity. I still believe that it is shameful, and when compared to the risks to our lives that we took in creating a gay movement, it is cowardice. If New York can run Times Square on New Year's Eve, not to mention Halloween in the Village, then we can run a costume party
on Halloween just has we have done for decades.

If you believe that you deserve electoral support from gay people, you can undo the damage by guaranteeing a Castro event next year. Frankly, it's like the old adage ... if you don't the heat, vacate the kitchen.

The two things that really boil me about his reply are the "safe event" piffle and the Office of Special Events.

Safe, safe, safe. Safety is the rage ... Detroit sells SUVs because they are safe, notwithstanding that they are not safe, that they induce people into an orgy of bad driving, that they are deadly for the entire planet. But they're big and mean and heavy and ugly, so they must be safe. Soap sellers fool people into buying anti-bacterial soap because it is safe ... but it is not safe, it is dangerous, and it fools people into thinking that killing everything will make us safer. Politicians sells us "safety" in the form of "tough" prison sentences, but we are less safe because we have created monster criminals out of petty thugs, and we have created a prison gang culture that kills relentlessly far beyond prison walls, and we have created a reward system for rogue prosecutors to punish everyone, innocent or guilty, with a metaphorical death penalty. And of course poor dumb dubya sells us safety from terrorism, but he has made the world infinitely more dangerous, painstakingly built a platform upon which terrorism is thriving, and driven the reputation of this country lower than at any point since Vietnam.

Dufty is just one more in that long line of fear-mongering snake oil salesmen who promise that his special balm alone will guarantee your safety. But it won't ... it just creates ignorance and fear and makes our lives less colorful.

Now the Office of Special Events. By the time that Kublai Khan had completed the conquest of Song China in 1276, he had made sure to establish a Ministry of Rites to oversee public ritual. He patronized the arts, especially drama. In this, he was in line with previous Mongol conquering practice that had collected artisans from the far-flung corners of their new realms. Kublai Khan understood the role of ritual and celebration in the lives of a people. (The careful reader of my screeds will note that I have moved on in my reading from Genghis to Kublai; I am nearly finished John Man's rollicking if not precisely scholarly Kublai Khan: The Mongol King Who Remade China.) He also understood the need for a monarch to control both the people and his bureaucracy. Notwithstanding the monarchical reign of Mayor Gavin Newsom who will be acclaimed rather than re-elected a few days hence, we do not have the pleasures and agonies of a Kublai Khan. We have to rely on re-cycled accountants like the plain gray dank Dufty.

Mongol warrior or pencil sharpener, an official should be able to create an "Office" when he sets out to do so, or he should "vacate the kitchen". Dufty failed. He does not have the clout, what the Chinese might have called the mandate of heaven. In this case, it is the mandate of the merchants' associations or the homeowners' grousing clubs. So, having failed in stitching together yet another bevy of mournful civic hand-wringers, Dufty kills the "special event." Tiny minded ... and cowardly.

Now they like to proclaim that they ... the "they" here are the hand-wringers and their pencil-sharpening goatherds (refuse to fear the mixed metaphor) ... can start with a clean slate. Nonsense. The Halloween celebration in the Castro grew from history and struggle and pride and art. I promise you, they will try to bring children into this thing, they'll do anything to relocate it, they'll fulminate and mealy-mouth all year long, and they still will not be any closer to where they should have started in the first place: provide the services, police the perimeters, engage the celebrants.

And don't turn into a squawking, the sky-is-falling, prancing chicken in the face of one small episode.

Tiny minds make tiny cities. If we are to be remade as a city filled with Bevan Dufty's, then let us call things by their real names and change our name from San Francisco to Smallville.

Previous post on Halloween Shame in the Castro here.

Halloween Shame in the Castro

So the grey-complected bureaucrats, shivering in their dank shuttered offices in self-righteous fear of the lusty and boisterous city they haunt, have managed to do what homophobes and the cops of earlier eras never could ... they killed Halloween in the Castro. Shame on them. Shame especially on Supervisor Bevan Dufty, a gay man, who does the work of the homophobes.

As I write only a few blocks from the darkened streets of the historical core of the gay revolution, they have closed public transit and strong-armed merchants and bar-owners into closing early. They have barricaded the sidewalks so revelers cannot take the streets. They have banned parking not to make room for merriment or celebration, but to make room for their own police-state tactics. They did this in the name of "safety" because of a few fringe bad episodes in an otherwise exuberant celebration of hundreds of thousands of people.

It is not coincidental that this occurs a few day safter the New York Times features a story that does not lament the decline of gay neighborhoods ... are they passé, it asks. It's ostensibly about social change, but actually about obscene real estate prices. I believe that the moral force behind killing Halloween here is a combination of grumpy old gay property owners who begrudge to current youth the fun they had in their own youths, along with the new smiling straight property owners who pat themselves ceaselessly on the back for finding a neighborhood where they can be cool. Neither group wants our history except, perhaps, in a tasteful library display.

We need our history because it is a visceral reminder of the fact that we have had to fight with our bodies and our lives for the freedom we have. We conducted that fight in living memory. Stonewall happened when I was 16. When I was 10 in 1963, on the day of Halloween, the reactionary San Francisco city authorities revoked the license of the epochal Black Cat, a well-known gay hangout. The "nelly queens" celebrated one last time that Halloween, drinking non-alcoholic beverages, and the place closed forever.

Halloween in the Castro, 1997

Gay people celebrate Halloween, the great gay holiday, because it is a festival of difference ... it is visceral play of the dialectic between appearance and reality. Look at it ... night plus costumes plus play plus blasphemy ... what is not gay about that? Many groups may claim Halloween, and so be it, but Halloween is ours. It is celebration of transgression, and our lives through no fault of our own have been transgressive since the dawn of christianity. The bastards cannot take it from us ... but the bureaucrats did. They stripped it from our heartland. How heartless.

Halloween in the Castro, 2006

Guys spend all year creating magnificent costumes. This has been a decades long focal point of creativity and expressiveness that allows our deeply creative community to strut its stuff, to show the world that we may be out there, but being out there is a great way to live. But such considerations of expression and creation are too much for the tiny minded civic school-marms. A pox on you, Dufty. Shame on you

Before gay liberation, the drag queens of Toronto used to march back and forth between the Parkside Bar and St. Charles Tavern on Yonge Street to the jeers and pelting of a mob ... the pelting lasted until 1980, but the Halloween party goes on. I am reliably informed that similar parades of drag queens occurred in many cities but I do not have a reference at this point. But we had the guts to do it, and we had the guts to suffer the taunts and the attacks until we could mount a movement to secure our liberty.

Halloween in the 70s and 80s in the Castro often featured violence much worse than the couple of incidents that form the "casus belli" against gay Halloween for our grey bureaucrats. CUAV, Community United Against Violence, was founded in 1979 to fight back against gay bashing, and it actively patrolled the neighborhood. The police in those days were of precious little help. As the celebration grew and grew, the police came to play a better role. Now they have been enlisted to kill the fun.

This city likes to pretend that it is the "city that knows how." No way, now. This is a city that cannot run a transit system, that cannot pave its streets, that cannot clean up its garbage, that cannot help its homeless, that cannot provide affordable housing, that can no longer serve the artists and misfits and refugees who make it what it is. Tourists come to San Francisco because it is different. But it is less and less different every passing hour as we are invaded by smug suburbanites and SUVs and nervous lookie-loos with no more creativity than the blister packs of the consumerism that is their only joy.

Now the city meekly claims it cannot manage a large, popular, recurring event. New Orleans can manage Mardi Gras, but San Francisco can't handle Halloween. New York can manage Halloween in the Village not to mention Times Square on New Year's Eve, but San Francisco can't bring itself to do the same. The city that mourns its lost bids for the Olympics whines and snivels that it can't handle happy people in costumes on the streets. For crying out loud, Pamplona can handle mad bulls rushing through the streets clogged with human beings, but San Francisco, o poor San Francisco, can't manage a street fair. Shame on the bureaucrats. Shame especially on Dufty, who would know better if he had an ounce of sense of who we really are or where we came from or what we have done. It is especially disheartening that Mayor Newsom, who has fought the good fight for gay marriage, does not understand what a kick in the nuts this is. Think big, Gavin. Don't be a grey-complected bureaucrat like teeny weeny Dufty whose political career is over and who will go nowhere. We need the bold, not the meek, in office.

In the background, I have just watched a 1997 History Channel documentary narrated by Harry Smith, called A Haunted History of Halloween, that doesn't bother to mention gay people at all, even as they show pictures of the celebration in Greenwich Village. Our history is perpetually silenced. It is one of the chief methods of eliminating us. When the City of San Francisco silences our annual celebration of ourselves, it is complicit in that strategy. Closing the Castro Halloween Celebration is homophobic, and it is a stain on the careers of those politicians who established the policy, and on the city where we have fought for our liberation for a century. Shame on San Francisco. Shame.


More ranting on this subject here!